2 Philadelphia scientists receive NIH "new innovator" award

Two Philadelphia scientists were among the 55 selected nationally by the National Institutes of Health to receive a “New Innovator Award” — an honor that includes a five-year, $1.5 million research grant.

The New Innovator Award, established in 2007, supports “unusually innovative research” from early career investigators who are within 10 years of their final degree or clinical residency and have not yet received a research project grant or equivalent NIH grant.

The two local researchers selected by the NIH for the honor were Hao Wu, an assistant professor of genetics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and Kavitha Sarma, an assistant professor in Wistar Institute’s gene expression and regulation program.

Wu, who is also a core member of the Epigenetics Institute at Penn, came to the university in 2016. His lab is focused on the development of profiling and editing tools to investigate molecular interactions between environmental factors, such as oxygen levels in tissues, and the epigenome, a battery of chemical marks that control gene expression.

The NIH award will fund Wu’s study of how the epigenome of heart muscle cells respond, and adapt, to changing environmental oxygen levels. He is studying whether a better understanding of the molecular program that promotes proliferation of heart muscle cells in the embryos can lead to new therapeutic approaches to treat adult heart disease.

Sarma plans to use the NIH funding to support her research efforts to understand chromatin structures and mechanisms in neurodegeneration and cancer, and identify new therapeutic targets for associated diseases. The chromatin is the materials — consisting of DNA, RNA, and various proteins — that make up the chromosomes of organisms, other than bacteria, during cell division.

NIH Director Dr. Francis S. Collins said in a statement that he continually points to the new innovator award program as an example of the creative and revolutionary research the NIH supports. “The quality of the investigators and the impact their research has on the biomedical field is extraordinary,” he said.